The Map is Not the Territory
by BrokenWingFlying
Summary: Every time Rose sees one of the Hermione's scars, she thinks has discovered part of the map that would help her understand her mother. But Hermione's life is deeper than the marks she's accumulated.
1. Chapter 1

"Mummy, what's this one from?"

Hermione looked down to see five-year-old Rose's still-pudgy fingers tracing the v-shaped scar on her right thumb. Rose had been sitting in her lap in the old rocking chair in her room while they read "Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump." It was a story Rose could read on her own, but sometimes a little girl still needed to cuddle with her mother. From the earliest days when she could intentionally move her fingers, it seemed that Rose's had homed in on the scars that made a map of Hermione's life. Other children, even her sweet young Hugo, soothed themselves by sucking their thumbs or twisting hair around their fingers. But Rose was always comforted by touching her mother, and her little fingers knew every ridge, every wrinkle of her hands and face.

"Hmm?" Hermione pulled her mind back to her little girl, from where it had drifted. Babbitty Rabbity wasn't as riveting as it had been when she searched the _Tales_ for insight into why a slightly batty but respected wizard had sent her on a chase that had ended with her in a cold tent on the run with Ron and Harry. Just now her attention had drifted to the report still sitting on her desk at the DMLE. While she had been reading the familiar story, she'd ben mentally outlining the last bit of the argument she needed to make in her newest request for opening the Aurors Office to non-humans. If she could just get fifteen more minutes at work tomorrow, she'd be able to finish it and send it on to her department head. She'd been almost done when the owl had dropped a note from Ron on her desk. It was his day to watch the children, but he'd been called in on a case that had been "totally back-burner, 'Mione, but now it's not!" So, she'd gathered her things and Flooed home to take care of the Rose and Hugo. He'd better be home soon, was all she could think. Because once she got Rose settled, she'd have to check on Hugo one more time. Then she could sift through the pile of potential projects sitting on her desk and reprioritize what needed to be done next. But finishing Rose's bedtime routine first meant paying attention to her little voice with its bigger-than-realized questions.

"Oh, I was cleaning a phial in the potions lab when it cracked and sliced my thumb. The dittany was a little further away than I remembered, so it never healed quite right. Why do you ask, Rosie-mine?"

"Just wondering, Mummy."

Hermione's brief answer satisfied Rose, but it started a chain of memories. It was true that she had cut her hand open cleaning a phial in the potions lab. And it was true that the dittany was inexplicably further away that she thought. But she had a severely edited the story. The accident had taken place in Fifth Year Potions lab when her attention was yet again divided between the potion they were assigned to brew, making sure that Harry and Draco didn't come to blows, and preventing Neville from either collapsing under Professor Snape's glare or causing the Potions classroom to explode. It was when Harry had been insisting (again) that Draco was up to no good, and Ron had been encouraging him.

"Oi. Harry, pass the hedgehog spines. I've got to grind them up," he had started. "And Hermione, you might as well admit there's something worse than normal with Malfoy. Has to be. He hasn't harassed Hagrid in weeks."

Hermione paused in her repetitive stirring. She didn't know what would happen to her brew if she lost track of the number of alternating clockwise and counterclockwise stirs of the cauldron, but someone needed to manage what was going on in the classroom. She divided her muttering between Neville ("No, grind them, not drop them in whole!") and Ron ("Honestly, your evidence is that he's a slightly better human? That's how you know he's evil?"). Her muttering wasn't quiet enough to avoid Professor Snape's attention.

"Detention, Miss Granger. Perhaps you will remember to work individually in the future?"

She gritted her teeth and held tightly to the phial into which she had just decanted the assigned potion for the day. Too tightly, as it shattered in her grip, splashing drops on her fingertips of her perfectly brewed Restfulness Restorative, which was supposed to help OWL students at least feel as if that had slept when they had been studying.

When she showed up that evening for detention, she still had Harry's and Ron's complaints about the unfairness of it ringing in her memory. Professor Snape was sitting at his desk marking first year essays and indicated with a nod that she should clean the cauldrons left behind by the Third Years. She began to think that Harry and Ron were right about the basic injustice of being required to scrub when she really would be better served doing almost anything. However, she started scrubbing the cauldrons by hand and soon fell into a rhythm marked only by the scratching of Professor Snape's quill as he wrote scathing comments on the first years' essays. Hermione had moved on to the glassware when Professor Snape suddenly hissed and gripped his arm. The potions classroom had been so silent that she startled at the noise and cracked the phial that she was currently cleaning while her hand was still inside it. As she twisted to see what was wrong with Professor Snape, the glass sliced open her thumb. When she turned back to her work, she realized first that she was bleeding and then that the cut was deep enough that she could see bone. It was her turn to gasp.

Professor Snape stood and tried to dismiss her. "Miss Granger, you have cleaned enough for tonight. I forgot another appointment that I must now leave to attend. Take your things and go back to your common room."

She tried to interrupt him to let him know she was injured, but he left through the door into his private stores before she could get out more than a "But, Professor…" So, she grabbed a clean cloth to wrap around her hand and headed for Madame Pomfrey. By the time she got there, pale-faced due to how rapidly the blood was coloring the cloth she had taken, and Madame Pomfrey had summoned the dittany, she realized that there must have been some residue inside the phial from whatever potion it held previously. Madame Pomfrey tutted as she worked over Hermione's hand and finally ended with, "Well, dear, I'm not sure what he had you cleaning, but it looks as if there will be a scar. I'm sorry."

The scar itself had never bothered Hermione, but feeling Rose's finger trace it gently, over and over, made her wish that she had understood what Professor Snape had been doing when he rushed from the dungeon, that she had known what he had risked every time he left the grounds of Hogwarts in his false service to Voldemort. It wouldn't have changed the outcome of anything. But she still wished she had understood and maybe been kinder. When she looked at the scar with her daughter on her lap and remembered the prickly man and repeated, "Well, the dittany was too far away."


	2. Chapter 2

Rose watched her mother check the fit of her skirt in the mirror. As the daughter of a muggle-born witch, she understood how important her mother thought this meeting was, even though she didn't feel quite so excited or nervous as her mother did. For Rose, the past few years at Hogwarts had more firmly entrenched the view she picked up almost by osmosis from her Weasley relatives that the Muggle world was interesting, but mostly as a quaint curiosity. Even regular visits to her Granny Granger had never quite allowed her to feel comfortable with the Muggle side of her history.

"Mother," Rose reminded, "it'll be fine. You look wonderful. Very professional. Very Muggle-appropriate"

"Thank you, darling," Hermione replied briskly. "You know, though, this is the first new Prime Minister of Britain since I've been Minister for Magic." She turned and looked over her shoulder to see how the jacket from a new angle.

"Yes, Mother, but…"

"And I think presenting an image that she can more readily relate to is important, darling. Learning about the Magical community in Great Britain will be difficult enough if she also has to deal with someone who looks so completely different."

"Yes, Mother…."

"So, I just want to make sure that this suit is the best option for presenting that image. That I'm trustworthy. Or even just sane."

"Yes, Mother, but…"

Ron stuck his head in the room and heard the last sentence. He looked at his daughter and long-loved wife with a fond smile. "No use, Rose. When she's wound up, best to just let her find her own way through."

Hermione may have been Minister for Magic, but it didn't prevent her from screwing up her face and sticking her tongue out at her husband. "Ronald, I must say that 94% of the time I've been wound up has been largely your fault, so I suppose you would know the best solution." Her light laugh took the sting out of the words and he wandered off to find Hugo. Or cake. Either one seemed like it would be quite agreeable to him.

Rose watched Hermione turn in front of the mirror again and noticed a scar just below the hem of her skirt. It was shorter than Rose was used to seeing on her mother, probably because Rose didn't much keep up with Muggle fashion trends, and the robes her mother wore to the Ministry were always cut fuller and longer. Although Rose never thought of Hermione as being overly interested in clothing, she was apparently up to date enough to recognize what would be appropriate for her first appointment with the Prime Minister.

"Mother," Rose asked, "what have you done to your leg? There's a scar on your left knee."

"Hmm?"

Hermione drew her attention away from holding another skirt up in front of her and studying her reflection in the mirror to glance down at her leg, almost as if she expected to see a fresh scrape. "Oh, that's just where I fell when I was walking Granny Granger's dog when I was a little girl. I didn't even know I was a witch then, so all I used to treat it was a plaster and some ointment. That's where that one came from."

"I never knew Granny Granger had a dog! What kind was it?"

Hermione smiled. "Yes, you wouldn't have guessed it, would you? I know they always seemed so proper to you in comparison to your Weasley grandparents. We actually had a big white Great Pyrenees we named Daisy. She was massive and fluffy, and once she got it in her head that there might be something of interest around the corner, she was off."

Rose returned Hermione's smile, hoping for more of the story. She knew her mother as one of the "Golden Trio" and grown up on stories told around the dinner table when Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny came for dinner. She'd heard them so often that she and James had taken to mouthing the punchlines behind their parents' backs. But she barely remembered hearing anything about what it was like for her mother before Hogwarts. It was almost as if that part of her life didn't exist, and now that she herself was in Hogwarts, she wondered sometimes what it had been like for her mother, a Muggle-born witch, to come into her power without any sense of what was happening, with no idea of the rules of the new culture she was joining. Rose sometimes wondered if she'd understand herself better if she knew more of where she had come from, but Mother always seemed reluctant to talk about her early life.

Hermione turned from the mirror and moved to sit next to Rose on the bed. "Daisy had decided there was something in the hedge between our house and our neighbors'." She shoved at the pile of shirts to clear space for herself. "We could never see it. Grandad Granger used to say she was chasing Hobbin-snakens. He just made that word up because Daisy was convinced there was something to follow."

Rose giggled, thinking it sounded like something Aunt Luna would try to get funding to study in the wild.

Hermione continued, "I had Daisy on a lead and we were coming back from a short walk around our neighborhood. I was probably too young to have taken her out by myself, but I was convinced that my 8-year-old self could walk her. Unfortunately, Daisy took it in her head that there was a Hobbin-snaken next door and decided the best way to get to it was to go _through_ the hedge, with me still holding onto the lead. I was so surprised that I forgot to drop it and got dragged along behind."

Hermione looked down at her knee, remembering more than she told, remembering the boy who'd watched the whole thing and laughed and crowed about how Granger "thought she was smart, but couldn't even be trusted to walk a dog properly." Hermione-now bristled at the memory of how Hermione-then had felt crushed by the stupid boy's hateful comments. She had always abhorred being made to feel small or silly. And Reggie, who lived down the lane, had tried to do so frequently. As Hermione had stood on one side of the hedge, holding so tightly to a leash attached to a still-barking Daisy on the other side of the hedge that her arm disappeared into the hedge up to her elbow, she had started to wilt. And then, she hadn't. She had turned her brown eyes toward him, drawn herself up and said clearly, "Reginald Davies, I would rather hold on to my dog's leash and get scraped up a bit, than leave her to run wild and get injured. But I'm guessing you know very little about what it means to care for something."

Reginald had drawn his head back and narrowed his eyes. Had she heard him asking his parents yet again for a dog? How did she know he'd had his heart set on a puppy?

Hermione didn't stop there. "If you actually did care, for instance, you'd go around to Mrs. Willis's side of the hedge and grab Daisy's collar. If you had one iota of sense, you'd have tried to help me keep Daisy safe rather than mock me. In fact…"

She didn't need to say more, because he'd already run to do her bidding. He called out when he had the collar and she released her end of the leash, ran around the end of the hedge and went through Mrs. Willis's gate. She held her hand out for the leash that Reggie was gripping, her eyes still angry. As he handed the leash back, she softened. After all, he had helped her with Daisy, even if he hadn't wanted to originally.

She thoughtfully returned from her memories to her current bedroom, with her daughter sprawled across her bed surrounded by the piles of clothes she had pulled out of the wardrobe to try to impress the Prime Minister. With one more firm look in the mirror, she reminded herself that long before she had known she was a witch she had been able to control the situations around her. Although she had been an awkward child, at her core she knew she was someone who understood people and could convince them to act as they needed to. The scar on her knee was a talisman to remind her of that. The Prime Minister would be no different than Reggie Davies. She would do what Hermione needed done in the end.

With one last tug at the jacket she was wearing, she turned from the mirror. "Thank you for your help, Rosie-mine. I think this suit is the right one. I believe it all will be just fine."


	3. Chapter 3

Rose had inherited her mother's love of books. After graduating from Hogwarts, her first job had been working at Flourish and Blott's. She had started stocking shelves, despite her father's concerns that working in a shop was selling herself short. Her mother had agreed and had even offered to try to get her a position in her old department at the Ministry if she wanted to start in politics. Rose hadn't cared about either of their worries; she just wanted to be around books. She started to understand their anxieties, though, when back to school season had returned at the end of summer. The harried faces of the parents with long lists of books to buy, and the looks of boredom on the faces of their children who seemed more intent on heading to Uncle George's store than excited about their upcoming studies made her realize just how horrible the weeks leading up to the start of term at Hogwarts could be.

She was pleased when she was promoted to a book buyer after the school rush was over. She was sent out to scour Muggle used-book shops and jumble sales to find the kinds of books that the original owners didn't really understand. The first time she had found a grimoire disguised as an old Julia Child cookbook and brought it back to the shop she had known that she had been right to turn down her mother's offer. Book hunting, restoring magical knowledge to her community was her joy. She loved being out in book shops throughout the Midlands trying to find the next treasure. Which was how she found herself hunched over between two bookshelves in a back corner of some tiny, dusty second-hand shop, trying not to gag.

She had just placed _The Hedgewitch's Compendium_ (nothing but a collection of poor poetry) back on the shelf when she saw a book with a grainy black and white image of people whose blank eyes stared out of emaciated faces. She knew very little about Muggle history, despite Granny and Grandad trying to interest Hugo and her in their family heritage during trips to see them every summer. But something about the picture on the front of the book made her want to look closer. And then she saw it. Just where her mother's Mudblood scar was placed, these people had numbers.

She opened the book and started to thumb through it, thinking about all she had read at Hogwarts about the Second Wizarding War (always wondering why her mother wouldn't talk about it, always trying to understand her mother). The librarian had always looked at her as if there was something wrong with her for checking out the books, but no matter how much she read she couldn't understand why adults had left children to fight a war. It made no sense.

As she paged through the book in her hands, she was horrified. She stopped at another image of the tattoos forced on the people in concentration camps and traced the numbers as she had always wanted to trace the letters on her mother's arm, remembering how frequently her mother pulled her sleeves down to hide the scar from everyone around her. On certain days when Mum was quieter than normal, even through the long sleeves Rose would catch her mother faintly tracing the letters. Rose's eyes would search out her father, who almost always had a pained look on his face when he saw what Hermione was doing. Nothing was ever said. Mum never talked about how she got that scar, and even though she talked to Dad about almost everything, she knew better than to ask about this. She finally figured out from her Hogwarts extracurricular reading why he looked so grim and she looked so thoughtful as she traced the scar. That history book she had found in the Hogwarts library had made also made her gag. She had made Hugo read it, and the pained expression he had when he returned the book to her somehow helped. It was good for both of them who had lived through those repeated silences to better understand their source.

She wondered if the children of the Muggle camp survivors were as silent as she was. If they had dealt with their parents' silence as she and Hugo had. She slipped the book into the basket she carried and moved slowly to the front of the store.

 **(Repost for formatting)**


	4. Chapter 4

Rose found her mother out in the garden. She seemed to spend more and more of her time there since she retired from the Ministry. When her dad had still been alive, they had talked about travelling more once Mum was finished, but he had died less than a year after she was done working. The Healers said that it was likely trauma from the war years. Despite Rose and Hugo urging, and the willingness of her grandchildren to travel with her, Hermione had moved to a little cottage in the Cotswolds that had more windows than walls. "I'd like to feel like I'm outdoors," she had said, and she kept to that, spending most of her time in her garden.

Hermione was reaching to trim back the raspberry canes, preparing for winter. As she stretched over, the back of her jumper rode up, and Rose saw the edge of the scar that she didn't remember seeing before. She thought she knew her mother well enough to know the landmarks of her body, but this was new to her, although it looked like an old mark. She knew without asking where this scar had come from.

When Rose had been a student at Hogwarts, long before her own life with Scorpius and the boys had taken so much of her attention, she had tried to understand her mother by reading all of the histories of the War against Voldemort that she could. The history that she had forced Hugo to read was just the beginning. Rose had spent all of her free time for one whole term creating a massive time-line of the events that had shaped her parents, that had made them unknowable to her. Being her mother's daughter, it was color-coded. She always noted key events for her mother in purple, and looking at the distorted embrace of her mother's scar that she wound up and around her chest under her jumper, and even now, fifty years distant from her time-line, she could see the purple circle she had drawn around her still-childish writing of _Department of Mysteries_. She had done so much research about her parents' time at Hogwarts, but had never figured out how to ask them outright. She knew the events down to the minute, almost, but had never worked out how they had felt. She had come to the conclusion that she didn't have the right to their emotions about the War. They had been on public display for long enough, she had felt and to ask about their private emotions and responses to what they had seen and done was one request she didn't want to make of them.

"Mum," she said quietly, not wishing to startle Hermione. Her mother turned toward her, her still-unruly hair now silvered. "I brought some dinner for you to heat up later on."

Hermione smiled at her daughter. "Hello, Rosie-Mine. Let me finish these last canes and I'll make us some tea. Can you stop for a few minutes?"

"Yes, Mum. Scorpius is visiting Draco and Astoria, but I've got the afternoon free." She leaned over and held the last few canes still while her mother used her secateurs to trim the thin and weak ones. "No magic for this job, hmmm?"

Hermione's smile widened still further. "You know that some things just work better when you take a Muggle approach. I'm sure your Grandmother Weasley would have disagreed, but I just can't make myself _diffindo_ them."

After they moved to the house, Rose sat at the table waiting for the tea to steep, patient. After all her years of trying to figure her mother out, of trying to map her life, she was willing to wait and receive what her mother was willing to give. Mostly.

"Mum," she began, "you know I never asked you and Dad about your time in the war. At first I was too little to understand, and then when I was old enough, I wanted to respect your privacy. It wasn't that I didn't care."

"Oh, Rose, we never thought you uncaring. Sometimes, honestly, it would have been too difficult to try to explain." She paused. "What brought this up? You didn't come all the way to Cirencester to tell me that did you?"

Rose could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. Why had she brought this up? And why was she blushing as if she was a teenager again instead of a woman whose own children were finished with Hogwarts. "Well, I just saw the back of your jumper ride up when you were in the garden, and I saw your scar. I had never seen that one before, so I started thinking…" She trailed off, uncertain how to clarify her thinking for herself, let alone her mother.

"I sometimes feel like every time I've tried to understand your life, tried to map it out, I've been navigating in the dark. I used to try to keep track of the tangible things that I thought would help me understand you." She looked down at the tea her mother had poured for her. "Like your scars. I always thought I could know you better by understanding your scars."

"Rosie-Mine," Hermione smiled, "there was a Muggle writer who once said, 'The map is not the territory.' There's so much more to any territory than what someone drew on some paper. The map doesn't tell you the smell of the forest as it comes to life, or when the bluebells will fill the glade so that you think you've stumbled across a lake when you finally see them. The map is just the barest of outlines."

Rose looked up from her tea and held her breath as she waited for whatever her mother would say next.

"Rosie, you knew the territory. You didn't need the map. You knew me."

Rose reached across the table to grip her mother's hand, still strong although it had grown weathered. Mum was right. Knowing the territory was more important, better, than the most detailed of maps ever could be.

 **(For my mother, a territory still unknown.)**


End file.
